Call is a sign of the times. Deepak Chopra's global meditation livestream event Sunday drew too many people into a cluster that it crashed the website, forcing a last-minute reschedule.
But instead of social distancing, Chopra said it was due to the sheer number of prospective participants that had logged onto The Well's website looking for peace amid a global coronavirus pandemic, so organizers switched platforms from a Vimeo-supported stream to Facebook Live. Chopra announced the news when he went live, just after 9 a.m. PT. "We had set up a site but the site crashed — the Vimeo site crashed. We were hoping for a million people and indeed we think we had them," Chopra said of the huge number of users, which another source said was in the hundreds of thousands.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the event, Chopra said the idea and the partnership with The Well "grew out of a feeling I’ve had long before the COVID-19 crisis, a feeling that global disruption needs to be countered by global community." On that note, he opened Sunday's mantra-based meditation with the reminder that "every crisis has a creative solution and every adversity contains the seeds of a creative opportunity."
He closed the meditation by telling viewers to "anchor yourselves." As of Monday, there were more than 185,000 views on Facebook Live for the video, which Chopra said his team would be posting on YouTube, The Well, and both the Chopra Foundation and Chopra Center websites, "so you can come back and shared it with your loved ones."
It's not the only global meditation initiative Chopra has going at the moment. He's also partnered with Oprah Winfrey on #HopeGoesGlobal, a 21-day meditation initiative.
